


Mutual Appreciation Society

by PancakeBeast



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: (of the pre-war USA), (same as in game), Adopted Shaun, Fluff, M/M, Mixed perspective, Referenced Sinophobia, Romance, Scene Rewrite, Sole Survivor with a name, Suicidal Ideation Mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-12 13:36:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10492026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PancakeBeast/pseuds/PancakeBeast
Summary: Extension of the romance conversation.  Bonus: an unusual explanation for the SS's marriage.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This SS hadn’t met MacCready yet but he does the MacCready thing with cursing for basically the same reason MacCready does it.
> 
> (Yes, Matthew is essentially the same character as [Maethr Trevelyan](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4630446). Not a crossover though, and far from a self-insert; just an OC I love dropping into different worlds.)

It was another keep-going-‘til-he-dropped kind of day.  He and Preston found a tiny dead-end alley not far from where Goodneighbor was supposed to be.  There was even a mattress, though it was so filthy and soggy that neither of them seriously considered sleeping on it.  Instead the mattress lay untouched at their left like a sullen third wheel.  For some minutes there were only the sounds of wasteland dinner: the crunch of salisbury steak, the hissless opening of a bottle of flat Nuka-Cola.  They poured a little Cola on their steaks to soften them up and put some flavor back in.  That was a trick Preston taught Matthew several days ago.  Had it been days already?  Had it only been days?

The quietness of the meal was comfortable.  For the time being, there wasn’t even gunfire to be heard in the distance.  The two men sat against a brick wall, the identical bricks of the next building less than a meter from their feet.  Eaves narrowed the view above and contributed to the sense of sheltering, but it was otherwise a clear glimpse of the sky.  Twilight gathered.  Preston had volunteered to take first watch, but despite how exhausted Matthew was, he wasn’t exactly dropping.  His eyelids were lightened by an unasked-for second wind.  Or third wind.

Matthew unfolded his arms, stretched out his legs, and began cleaning his ten-millimeter.  Preston glanced at the General as he got a cloth out of his rucksack, then went back to watching the street.  Only moments later he glanced over again, pensive.

“General?”  For the sake of covertness, and perhaps in hesitance, he spoke just above a whisper.

Looking up, Matthew languidly shoved his hand through his hair, in one motion sweeping back the forelocks that framed his face, and all at once Preston had his complete attention.  In the dimness and deepening shadows, Matthew’s face looked hawkish, his lively light-amber eyes reduced to gleams.  For an instant, Preston faltered, questioning whether his query might have come as a disturbance.  But no: there was that friendly twist of Matthew’s lips, the habitual smile that was only technically a smirk.  And Matthew had never taken offense to anything Preston had to say.

“Yeah?”  The General’s voice had a youthful pitch, but there was a tempered softness to it as well.  Right now he sounded less weary than Preston would have expected.  By now he’d seen and heard Matthew in numerous states of exhaustion, as they’d run themselves ragged helping everyone they could while on the trail of Matthew’s son.

“I’ve been thinking back on how things were for me when we first met.”

Matthew listened.  The alley, too, seemed to receive into its shadows the words that passed Preston’s lips.

“It was the lowest point of my life.  I mean… all my closest friends were dead.  Everything I believed in had turned out to be a lie.  I’d failed everyone who’d ever relied on me.  I’d led them to Concord and we had no hope of getting out alive.  The thing is…  That was actually okay with me.  I was ready to die.  It was what I felt I deserved.  It was what I wanted.”

Matthew was listening so intently, in fact, that he barely breathed.  He became aware of his heartbeat.  He was glad for Preston’s.  "…I never realized you’d lost hope like that…“

"I had to put on a brave face as long as there were still people counting on me.  That’s the only reason I kept going.”  Preston quietly drew a deep breath.  "My point in all of this is that, well… you saved my life.  And not just by saving us from those raiders in Concord.  I mean, that you…made me want to keep living again.  I guess that sounds pretty sappy, but it’s true.  If we hadn’t met, or if you’d killed those raiders and then just taken off…  I don’t know if I’d still be around.  I think I would have found some way to…you know…  End it.  Maybe not by shooting myself in the head or anything, but just by not caring about staying alive.  So, I just wanted you to know that.  How much our friendship has meant to me.“

There was a moment in which Matthew said nothing and Preston wondered if he had said too much.  Then Matthew took a deep breath of his own, catching up on oxygen, and ventured carefully, "It means a lot to me too.”  Preston couldn’t mistake the sincerity in those words.  "You mean a lot to me,“ Matthew continued.  Preston felt his ears grow warm, and he thought those might be the sweetest words he’d get from the General, ever.  But Matthew wasn’t done.  "I dunno if this is a fff– hecked up thing to ask, what with me being your General 'n’ all, but well, you put me there, so…  Have you ever thought about…”  Matthew resisted the urge to swallow nervously.  It was ridiculous.  He used to be such a flirt.  But he was rusty.  No, that wasn’t the problem.   _This was different._  "Becoming more than friends?“

Preston’s brain did a double-take.  Then his heart did a somersault.  "Have I ever…?  You mean you’ve also…”  Surprise, confusion, joy.  He was grinning and he wasn’t sure when he started.  "Hold on.  You kind of caught me off guard there.“

Matthew grinned back, unable not to.  The feeling overwhelming him was something he’d never known before–something he never let himself know.  The closest comparison he could find was his love for Shaun, but it was certainly different.  Maybe the circumstances had something to do with it–the traumas plural, the bonding through shared endangerment–but he’d so quickly begun to see Preston as a light in his life, a partner in justice, and as a man so worthy of love that Matthew couldn’t maintain the walls around his heart.  Preston had gotten into his heart just by being who he was.

"Since we met,” Preston answered, “I think you know I’ve really come to respect you.  Both as a leader, and as a friend.  If you’re asking if I’ve ever thought about you…romantically, the short answer is…yes.  But I didn’t ever imagine that you could feel the same way about me.  I mean, I know she’s gone, but…your wife…it wasn’t that long ago…”

Matthew’s wide smile diminished.  Subtleties of his expression were impossible to discern in the darkness: it was bittersweet and wry.  "We weren’t–…it wasn’t like that,“ he explained.  It hadn’t come up before, and now he had a lot to explain.  "We were friends.  Got married for convenience basically.  Well, it was a lot more than convenience for her.  Being married to a decorated soldier– she was third-generation Chinese, see, her grandparents were immigrants, and…officially anyone Chinese was deemed a potential spy or saboteur, and they were rounded up into internment camps.”  Disgust laced Matthew’s reference to these government actions.  "We got married to try to protect her from the anti-Chinese bull– uh, bullcrap going around before things got that bad.  I pulled some strings and it worked.  Kept working.“  He smiled anew, softly: "Bonus, I was her beard as much as she was mine.  She wasn’t one for sex, I wasn’t one for women.  But she did want a kid.  We adopted a baby.  She gave me the choice whether I wanted to be the kid’s father or not.  Sure as hhheck there’re plenty of absentee fathers, no one would’ve looked askance at me being uninvolved, 'side from the occasional tisk-tisk.  But…yeah, I…decided to be the kid’s dad.  Decided to be Shaun’s dad.”  A sudden hush fell over him, and he got that feeling, that antsy almost-panic, the need to run out and _find Shaun_ and damn everything else.  Just as suddenly he felt guilty for sitting here and talking about all this with Preston and being happy while his son was out there somewhere.  Reminding himself that rest, travel time in the hectic city full of raiders and super mutants, and finding the damn detective were all real obstacles and not things he could wish away, Matthew forced the panic down as if swallowing bile.  He realized Preston was looking at him with obvious empathy and concern.  And apology.  Preston felt guilty too, for everything he’d been thankful to Matthew for that had delayed him from finding his kid.  Preston reminded himself that the settlers they’d helped mattered too.  Sons and daughters and mothers and fathers who might not still be alive tonight if Matthew hadn’t taken a few hours out of his mission here and there.  As much as he’d thanked Matthew, though, he hadn’t said _that_ to him; he didn’t dare; he didn’t know how.

Matthew heaved a sigh, expelling his own useless guilt, and moved closer to Preston, setting aside his half-disassembled gun in the process.  Now their legs lay side by side and their upper arms were in full contact.  Matthew kept his hands to himself however, lodging them between his thighs.  (The night wasn’t without an autumn chill.)  "My point is, I’m mourning a friend, not a wife.  So…don’t worry about that, Preston.  At any rate, I’m…willing to give it a try if you are.  You and me being more than friends, I mean.“  A smile returned to his face, not wide, but sincere and uncontrollably warm.

That warmth and more was present in his eyes too, Preston could see now that he was so close.  Their faces were so close now.  Despite the weight of the subjects they had just brushed, a tentative giddiness rose in Preston’s chest and all he could say was, "You are?  Really?”

“Mm,” Matthew affirmed, his eyes flitting down to Preston’s lips of their own accord and then back up to his eyes.  And then he confirmed his affirmation, “Yeah.”

“That’s…that’s fantastic!”  Only the phrase _swept off my feet_ sprang to Preston’s mind as he struggled to put what he was feeling now into sensible words.  "Wow, I, uh…well, I don’t really know what to say.“  He was failing to put it into words and he ought to be chagrined but he wasn’t, there was no room for that.  Then the proximity of the General’s face–no, Matthew’s face–to his own sparked a thought instead of just giddiness and he added, "We don’t need to rush things.  I’m just happy knowing that what I felt– that it was real. That it wasn’t just in my imagination.”

“Agreed.  But I sure wouldn’t mind kissing you right now, if that’s alright with you.”  Matthew smiled wide once more.   _There’s the old mojo,_ he thought fleetingly, satisfied and at this point quite surprised by how well that came out.  He hadn’t planned on kissing Preston when he moved closer–he’d just wanted to _be_ closer.  But it was an awfully appealing idea, and more so by the second.

“Oh,” Preston responded, the word emerging very quiet in his surprise.  His whole face warmed and no fiber of his being doubted that he would very much like to kiss and be kissed by Matthew.  There was no reason, he realized, no reason in the world, not to lean over and kiss his General.  So he did.

They could both still taste Nuka-Cola on one another’s chapped lips.  But that taste wasn’t overpowering, they could taste each other beneath it, the indescribable uniqueness of each.  Their lips had been kept warm by all the talking.  Matthew’s were thin but pliant.  The kiss was an embrace, or at most a very slow dance, just a little exploratory.  Preston’s hat was pushed back by Matthew’s forehead, but not so far as to fall off.  At about the same time they both began to smile, and before long they were smiling too wide to continue, but they remained for a moment like that, catching their breath–catching each other’s breath.  Their eyes opened and they finally let some space exist between them again because gazing was easier done at greater than point blank range.  Preston slowly brought up a hand, touched Matthew’s jaw with his fingertips, then cupped his cheek.  Matthew covered his hand, then mirrored the gesture, thumb giving Preston’s cheekbone a small stroke that spoke gratitude for the man’s very existence.


End file.
